The Tetris Effect
by Acey Dearest
Summary: Matt will say it’s a kidnapping, the very best consensual kidnapping, because it’s all their troubles they’re holding hostage. Chapter 83 spoilers. MattxMisa.


"The Tetris Effect"

by Acey

Author's Note: Set around chapter eighty-five.

They'll run away together. Matt is a bit of a romantic at heart; he's always clung to his ideals even as they damn him, and now with her clinging to him he isn't afraid of his own suggestion.

He won't say that he's tried this before and that all that did was rip at his insides, tear at the last shreds of himself that passed for innocence. She won't say that she's reached for saviors all her life and they've all but killed her. This time will be different. It will be special.

It will be lovely and perfect and the glow of morning light will shine on her face as she clutches him tightly. It will be the only good thing he's ever bothered with in nineteen years of inaction, but she won't know it; she'll think he's always this way. He'll be a gentleman and open the car door for her as they leave.

She's going to ask him (high, jingling giggle) just what exactly he's up to. Matt will say it's a kidnapping, the very best consensual kidnapping, because it's all their troubles they're holding hostage. Here's a miserable decade at Wammy's orphanage, ten tried, failed years, up for the highest bidder. Here's nearly six years with Light Yagami, six years of coming home to an empty apartment, of waking to a cold bed. Here they are; may anyone that wants them take them. Because they see those days for what they are now, just the hopeless, hapless facades of dreams, meant to be thrown away.

They'll dream real dreams now.

He'll take her in a car that smells of ashes and chocolate, and drive her all around the States. She'll tell him he needs to stop smoking and for her sake he will try to quit.

He'll give her theories; offer her his PSP to let her try her hand at old-school arcade games. When she gets bored or annoyed he'll tell her cheat codes so she'll find herself going from level one to level forty in the push of a few buttons. He'll tell her all about the games' histories, everything from Pac-Man to Galaxian and Mario, and when she asks him how and why he knows any of that he'll grin lopsidedly and shrug.

Misa puts the game on pause to tell her own stories. A girl she used to model on magazine covers with who tripped and fell on the runway, and blamed it on the corset being too tight (which was silly, Misa says, they never laced anyone up that tightly). Her father who was a photographer, who let her play in his studio as a child, staring in fascination at the colored lights and backdrops. Her mother who first fed the dream that Misa Amane should become a model but never lived to see it entirely fulfilled.

Matt pays her full attention, with none of his practiced disinterest. As he slows down for the highway traffic and she stops talking, he thinks about telling her about the half of his lifetime spent in England, boarded up like a lab rat in the race to be best. But that's behind him now, isn't it? He's kidnapped those memories, held them for ransom. If no one wants them—he'll let them go.

She looks at him expectantly, plain brown eyes waiting for his response. He should echo her topic, say how he vaguely recalls his mother and doesn't remember his father at all, but it's still a subject he isn't willing to manage.

Instead he mumbles something about the games (the damned games) that up to this moment he's reduced his life to. He clears his throat and talks quietly about the Tetris effect, where if you play any game or do any one thing too long, it'll be stuck somehow in your head and you'll see it in your mind's eye, in your dreams.

(even if you try to discard them)

And ten years can't be gotten rid of with any starry plan to run away from it all. Neither can six years, neither can any amount of years—time can't be effaced like Tetris blocks, can't disappear just because they're in a neat row. He wants to tell her that, too, but the look on her face holds him back.

He expects her to be disappointed, to pout a little because to her it doesn't make sense. He doesn't really think she understands exactly, but she nods as if she does, cross earrings bobbing along with her head.

In the meantime, he decides, he will show her the things he can't talk to her about. Show her those broken-down apartment buildings he used to live in as he teaches her American slang and chuckles at her tries with her heavy Japanese accent.

He'll convince her that they'll forget what they ran from, and by convincing her he hopes to convince himself. Kira's far away and so is Mello, both so very far away that they might as well not exist (but they do, oh, they do, Tetris effect all over again), and Matt holds on to that idea for all he's worth.

So they stop in an old town and he helps her into a horse-drawn carriage, where the driver points out the sights to the tourists in the blisteringly beautiful sun. They're nothing but tourists; this is nothing if not a dream itself. They're just a pair trying to drive their pasts away to the sound of a car's ignition and horse's hooves.

And because it is a dream, the sound changes and Matt wakes to the ring of his cell phone and Mello's hoarse, tired voice asking him what's happened. Matt says nothing has, but while he listens to the latest of Mello's instructions, he crushes his cigarette and turns one of his computers to the internet, where Misa gives her empty smile to him at last.

finis


End file.
